Monday, March 02, 2015

Seemingly every time I check the sports pages these days, I find a
story about someone going through contortions to build an NFL stadium
in Los Angeles, or to prevent someone else from doing so. Perhaps
the pick of the litter so far has been the most recent, about
a fifteen-page
incantation cast on behalf of sports conglomerate AEG by a wizard known as Tom Ridge. Says a writer at Dead Spin:

The
15-page report (which you can review in full right
here) is an incredible read, full of scary and baseless
predictions from a supposed expert on terrorism without an iota of
data to support its conclusions. Paragraph after paragraph of shit is
thrown against the wall, with Ridge and AEG hopeful that invoking
words like "terror" and "Al-Qaeda" alone will be enough to stop the
Inglewood project.

To call Ridge's argument "asinine" is
to miss the sewer for the poop. Consider the greater context
of his remarks: The context that makes such a document publishable as something others will have to take seriously -- rather than as a parody of a bad
student paper in an underground magazine at a high school somewhere.

We are in the middle of a war against Islamic
jihadists, but our government won't declare war or even name our
enemy. The government does acknowledge a problem -- but only to the
extent it needs to in order to boss around law-abiding citizens, such
as by forcing us to be treated like prison inmates every time we seek
to board an aircraft. Or by spying on our electronic
communications. Or by keeping us from building things They Who Must
Not Be Named might randomly try to attack. Rather than "leaving
smoking ruins and crying widows" in nations that aid Islamic
jihad, our government is busy creating excuses to limit our freedom.

This is hardly surprising, given the deliberate misuse of
government voters have been calling for more and more loudly in this
country ever since the 1930's. For every problem, people seek a
government solution, and for every annoyance, there are cries of, "There
ought to be a law." This has predictably
led to our current mixed economy and straw-grabbing justifications for
dispensing favors by the likes of Tom Ridge:

A mixed
economy is a mixture of freedom and controls -- with no principles,
rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of
controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an
unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the
controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no
principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws -- no
principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of
a mixed economy -- which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and
unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's
interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone
who can get away with it. Such a system—or, more precisely,
anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy
camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation
in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of
such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves
the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and
order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled
China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting -- and draining
-- the productive elements of the country. [bold added]

It is in this
context that we even have to consider the blatherings of a Tom Ridge,
and it is this context that we must end.

In a truly free
society, builders of stadiums would pay for them themselves -- or have
the aid only of investors, so random other people would not face the
prospect of being nickled-and-dimed for them by vote or legislative
fiat. The builders wouldn't have to seek permission from men who
produce nothing to build them, if they could afford to. And we
wouldn't be refusing to call a spade a spade overseas, while using the
very same card as an ace-in-the-hole domestically when it comes to
"justifying" the misuse of government force for the purpose of
meddling in other people's business. This would all be because we would all realize that the only proper purpose of the government is the protection of individual rights.

Tom Ridge's
arguments are asinine, but anyone complaining about them ought
to ask himself why anyone is having to listen to them in the first
place. If we want to stop hearing nonsense, we should work towards a
limited government, in which such nonsense won't stand the chance of
winning favors for -- or from -- anyone.